One of the positive outcomes of the kerfuffle was adding an all-woman panel tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. (Pacific time) on Women in Technology. Right in the middle of the Grace Hopper Celebration, how cool is that! Any chance GeekFeminism could set up a thread for people to discuss before, during, and after the panel?

OK then! Here’s your thread. But jon then writes:

The panel didn’t go well. TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy moderated and kicked it off by saying she didn’t think the panel belonged at the conference and didn’t want to be there but Arrington had told her she had to. It kinda went downhill from there. Most of the panelists were in women near tech (I think Sara Chipps of Girl Developer IT might have been the only programmer). With six panelists on a 30-minute panel and a very active moderator, most of them didn’t get to say much anyhow. Julieanne Smolinksi’s got a great writeup on Lemondrop. Here’s my take, which also has a lot of the discussion from tweetstream and links out to other reviews.

Was anyone else there? Were you as disappointed as jon? Did you find anything to take away from it? Any thoughts on how the panel could have been better?

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About Mary

Mary is a women in tech activist, a programmer, a writer, and a sometime computational linguist. She writes at puzzling.org. Her previous projects include co-founding the Ada Initiative and major contributions to the Geek Feminism blog. She's @me_gardiner on Twitter.

Sounds a lot like the “Women In Gaming” talk at PAX last year. Dear Conference Organizers: just because someone is a woman doesn’t mean she should be on a panel about “Women In $FOO”. In that case, being willing to objectify yourself so people will pay you to play video games appears to rule out being aware of sexism even when it is happening to you.

If you actually wanted to foster discussion about the environment at your conference, finding panelists who believe that sexism exists and have observed it happening would probably be a better approach than picking the six female-appearing names in the list of speakers.

Also, the little piece of Oppression Olympics was a nice touch. Good to see that we still can’t take responsibility for our privilege.

If you actually wanted to foster discussion about the environment at your conference, finding panelists who believe that sexism exists and have observed it happening would probably be a better approach than picking the six female-appearing names in the list of speakers.

But that goes against the purpose of the Women in Tech panel, which was to show that TechCrunch and Arrington and Silicon Valley are not sexist/biased against women.

Actually I think another purpose of the panel – just like everything else at Disrupt – is to promote TechCrunch and its friends. For example Cyan Banister (whose quote about women being too nurturing and risk-averse Arrington loves to use) is CEO of Zivity, which launched at the precursor to Disrupt in 2007 and has continued to get a lot of coverage for things like their deal with Playboy. Zivity’s chairman is her husband Scott, who was previously at Ironport, whose funders incuded Disrupt speakers Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. The Banisters are also investors in GameCrush, which made the finals of this year’s competition with their business model of connecting male gamers with “PlayDates” for $36/hour … you get the idea.